You can’t understate the importance of Les Paul to the development of modern music.

He helped create an electric guitar that remains revered to this day, the Gibson Les Paul. He invented recording equipment and techniques that revolutionized the way popular music was heard.

And he was a heck of a guitar player and songwriter, too.

So with the release of “Les Paul: Chasing Sound” on DVD last month, we were delighted at the chance to chat with Paul. And chat and chat and chat — even at 92, he’s still got a way of spinning a tale, heading out in one direction before circling back to answering the very question you’d originally asked him.

The film is well worth checking out. Here are a few highlights of the interview and a fascinating look at musical history.

On discovering his love for music:

“One day a sewer digger came along and was putting in a sewer out in front of the house — they were building my house (in Wisconsin), my mom and dad had just moved there. And on the lunch hour, this sewer digger would play his harmonica, and jumped off the front porch and ran down there, and I just stood there and listened to him.

“And after a couple of days, he said, ‘I think you like this harmonica.’ I said, ‘Oh, mister, it sounds so good!’ And he said, ‘Well here, I’m gonna give it to you. I didn’t even know my mother was there, but she was and she said, ‘You’re not going to play that until I boil it.’ ”

For more Paul memories, click here….

On his first effort to make an electric guitar when he was 8 years old:

“I thought about ways I could get my guitar louder, so I got a phonograph needle, poked it in (connected to a rudimentary PA) and was louder, but I got feedback from the hollow-body guitar. So I thought about it a little while, and finally got about five other kids in the neighborhood to help grab a wagon and take a piece of railroad track about two-a-half feet long.

“I strung a string across it and put half of the telephone under the string, plugged that into the radio and I’ll be darned if I didn’t hear the steel guitar. I ran to my mother and told her about it. And my mother said, ‘The day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a railroad track….’ So she blew that right out the window.”

On almost teaming up with Orange County’s Leo Fender to make a solid-body guitar:

“It was there in my backyard that this all began to ferment. Leo Fender would say to me, ‘I’m going to try a new amp out, so we’d try it out. Leo says, ‘Well why don’t we go into business together? You got the studio, you got the smarts and the stuff, and between the two of us, we could make a Les Paul Fender.’

“So I called Gibson (his longtime guitar maker) back in Chicago and said: ‘There’s a guy out here who’s got the same idea I’ve got. If we don’t do something about it, he’s going to do something about it. I don’t want to go with him — Gibson, you guys are the largest company in the world, you’ve got to take another look at this thing.’

And reluctantly they said, ‘OK.’ So I said to Leo, ‘No, I’m going to go my way, and he said, ‘OK,’ and he went his way. And Leo and I remained friends until he passed away.”

On what he thinks about a recent offer to sell a 1959 Gibson Les Paul guitar for $2 million:

“I think it’s stupid! (and then he laughs and laughs). But I’m not going to argue with the guy. It just shocked the hell out of me..”

On where his own famous guitars are — or will go eventually:

“There’s one guitar in the hall of fame in Cleveland. One in the Smithsonian. There’s guitars in Nashville. The ‘log’ I built (and early prototype made of a four-by-four) is in Nashville, in their museum. I have a big museum going in Waukesha, whereI lived, and in that museum there’s going to go lots of equipment that I invented.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

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